What is your dog really thinking?

The age old question us dog lovers all wonder! Does your dog feel guilty about ripping up those new pair of shoes or eating half your dinner when you weren’t looking? Can they understand what we are saying? Do they like watching TV or just laying by your side? Dogs have the same hormones and undergo the same chemical changes that we do during emotional states. Dogs have the hormone oxytocin, which in humans is involved with love and warmth. So you could say that dogs have similar emotions to us? Not exactly, the mind of a dog is around the equivalent to that of a human who is roughly two years old.

Dogs go through their developmental stages quicker than humans do, attaining their full emotional range by the time they are 4 to 6 months old. Much like a toddler, a dog has the central emotions: happiness, fear, anger, hate, excitement, contentment, distress, and love. A dog does not have, and will not develop the emotions of guilt, pride, contempt, and shame. So unfortunately they do not feel bad for destroying your new Nikes or eating half your chicken schnitzel.

But can they understand when you tell them off? Studies show that the average dog can understand about 165 different words. For example, dogs can learn that "leash" is a long thing that they wear on walks, but they don’t know that its purpose is to keep them from running free. Volume and tempo also matter in your voice. You can say "You're a naughty dog," but as long as you do so in a sing-song voice with a smile on your face, chances are your pet will read it as praise.

Now how about television, some dogs ignore the telly completely while others seem enthralled. When we look at a picture on TV or the film in the cinema, it seems that we are seeing a complete flowing image. What we’re actually looking at is lots of single frames.They seem to flow together because our eyes don't perceive the change from one image to the next. Old school TVs and films produce images at approx 24 frames per second and that’s okay for people because we have what we called a ‘flicker fusion frequency’ how quick the image needs to change of about 16 to 20 times a second. It’s shown that dogs flicker fusion frequency is a lot higher than ours, maybe 40 to 80 frames a second.

That means that when a dog’s looking at an old school television or a movie, it would see a lot of flickering. If you look at the latest plasma screens and digital televisions, they renew their images a lot faster, maybe up to a thousand times a second. So theoretically, our pets should be able to see things a lot better on more modern TVs.